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5 Key Factors For Successful Content

Your content is only as good as the effort you put into creating it. So if you want to achieve a successful online marketing campaign, dedication is essential. Just providing a fantastic product or service simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Effective content speaks to the online community and instantly connects with them. It also shows your prospective customers that you’re not solely focussed on revenue. In this post, we discuss the 5 key factors you need to consider in order for your content to be successful.

First of all, it’s important to determine what success means to your business. This will help you define the goals that your content strategy will focus on, which could include driving traffic, gaining conversions through downloads, contact form submissions and calls, or enhancing brand awareness.

Powerful content can bolster your online marketing by generating leads, as well as facilitating SEO.

With this in mind, let’s look at five key factors for successful content.

1. Quality

“Quality content” is so much more than a catchy buzzword for marketers. It’s one of the factors that search engines use to determine your rankings, so it’s imperative that your content is up to scratch. Spelling mistakes, typos and broken links are not acceptable in the digital age.

Introducing an auditing process for your content is a great way of ensuring that your message remains consistent, keywords and key themes are targeted and quality is maintained.

At this year’s SMX, Google’s Gary Illyes announced that their Panda algorithm update would be launched in June 2015, though this is yet to be introduced. However, the looming update provides even more reason to make sure that your content is unique and first-rate.

Sites with irrelevant, low-quality content will suffer the consequences of the algorithmic shift. The update aims to eradicate thin and duplicated content, both internally and externally.

2. Powerful Titles

At the ideation phase, it’s important to establish your predominant target audience and research what your competitors are producing. This way, you can create content on topics that will resonate with the right people.

Once you’ve got your ideas, you also need to make your titles targeted and as engaging as possible. If you’re uninspired when writing a title, how do you think your audience are going to feel? Optimise your content by ensuring that you always include relevant keywords and phrases in your titles and within the copy.

3. Useful Content

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What do they want to see? Get to know them and you will soon discover what content appeals to them the most. You can then create tailored and targeted online campaigns for your desired audience from the off.

There isn’t a secret formula for making your content shareable, but a great place to start is to make it useful. Content that benefits the end user stands a better chance of being shared online and acquiring quality links too.

Examples of useful content include:

Infographics

Videos

Interactive content like quizzes, polls, surveys and questionnaires

User guides

List format posts

However, this will ultimately depend on your target audience, so remember that it’s important to do your research first before you start creating your content.

4. Creativity

Let’s be honest: no one likes to feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, we like to be educated and entertained through quality, creative and inspiring content.

So get creative. Don’t rely on your tried-and-tested method. Just because that’s the way you’ve always done things doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right approach.

Make the most of relevant, upcoming events and breaking news stories to make your copy instantly connect with your audience.

If you create content for the sake of it, your audience will be able to tell and over-optimised content screams “sell, sell, sell”. So explain what’s in it for the reader and why they should continue to read on. Remember we’re all guilty of skimming online copy when it’s in front of us, so get to the point straight away.

To learn more about how to overcome content marketing challenges, take a look at Jenny Williams’ latest post.

5. Frequency

With 3.17 billion Internet users browsing the web every day, it’s never been more important to keep active online on different channels, whether that’s social media, webinars or blogging. This will help increase brand awareness and traffic and will also improve your rankings and conversions in the long run.

So how often should you post on social media for example? Well it’s all about balance. Too little and you might as well not bother, too much and it becomes spammy. The key is to predict, measure and then repeat.

Below is a brief guide to get you started:

Twitter: 3 per day

Facebook: 2 per day

Google+: 3 per day

Pinterest: 3 per day

LinkedIn: 1 per day

A comprehensive content marketing plan can help you target the key areas that you’ve identified and scheduled in promotional activity to share your content.

That said, bear in mind that you don’t always have to stick to your original plan. If you find that a marketing method or content type is performing better than others, it may be time to reassess your approach. Your plan needs to be fluid so that you’re able to adapt to new content ideas.

Let me know your thoughts on the factors for successful content. Do you have any good examples to share? If so, leave a comment below or tweet me @ruthawalker.

For more information on content marketing strategies that deliver results, get in touch today.

Free Whitepaper The Complete Guide To Content Marketing

8 Comments

Fantastic blog! Do you have any tips for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you recommend starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m completely confused .. Any recommendations? Thank you!

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